Savage Spring (35 page)

‘Yes, we have an Ottilia Stenlund. Number 39, Skoghöjdsvägen in Abrahamsberg. Would you like me to connect you, and send you a text message with the details?’

The phone rings three times, then Malin hears a tired, hoarse female voice at the other end.

‘Ottilia.’

Something in Ottilia Stenlund’s voice makes Malin think she was expecting a phone call.

From us?

‘My name’s Malin Fors, I’m a detective inspector with the Linköping Police.’

She explains the reason for her call.

Apologises for calling her at home, but given the circumstances it couldn’t be helped.

‘I still work at the same office,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘But today’s my day off.’

Friday off. Malin remembers reading an article in
Expressen
saying that Social Services had started to open on Saturdays to meet the extra demand from people affected by the financial crisis.

‘So do you have to work on Saturdays? I read about that.’

Show interest, build up trust, you never lose the habit, Malin thinks.

‘Sometimes I have to work Saturdays, yes.’

Ottilia Stenlund breathes, long, thoughtful breaths, and Malin asks: ‘I presume you’ve been following the case. And that you remember the girls.’

‘I have to keep everything confidential,’ Ottilia Stenlund says. ‘I’d be breaching our code of conduct if I said anything,’ and Malin feels a flash of anger as she snaps down the line: ‘They were blown to pieces. Can you imagine that? Those lovely little babies you helped to get adopted grew into two beautiful little girls, and now there’s nothing left of them but charred flesh, blood, and guts. So don’t try it on with all that fucking—’

And Zeke has rushed around the car and is now yanking the mobile from her hand, and Malin feels everything going black before her eyes, and is having trouble breathing, and she reaches out for the roof of the car and can feel still-warm bird shit between her fingers as she hears Zeke say: ‘I must apologise . . . my colleague is under a lot of pressure, we’re in a tight spot at the moment, is there any way you could make an exception, getting a court order to get around the confidentiality legislation takes time, and time is something we don’t have.’

The world grows clearer again.

Zeke, sounding resigned.

‘So you can’t make an exception? OK, thanks anyway.’

He clicks to end the call.

‘She was scared,’ Zeke says. ‘Couldn’t you hear it in her voice? She was absolutely terrified.’

It’s half past four by the time Zeke drops Malin off outside her flat.

The pair of them, Börje Svärd, Waldemar Ekenberg, and Johan Jakobsson have spent all Friday afternoon talking to people connected to the Vigerö family. Nothing terribly significant has emerged. The adoption seems to have been unknown to all of them, and the family appeared to have been impossibly happy.

And the Security Police have made their presence felt again.

On the same path as them? Not impossible. Sven Sjöman had taken care to keep them updated, as he had been instructed, and who knew what they might do with the information.

Ottilia Stenlund is my, our, best way forward, Malin tells herself.

The Pull & Bear has opened, and she stops outside the entrance to the pub, waiting for the urge to have a drink to wash over her, but as she stands there in front of the red and yellow paintwork she feels nothing. Just wants to get up to the flat, and a couple of minutes later she’s sitting on the sofa in the living room, staring at the wall.

Tove is out at Janne’s.

The bastard.

And then things start to move inside her body and she leaps up from the sofa. She needs to shake off this damn restlessness, can’t bear the thought of just looking at the shabby walls of the flat any longer, listening to the ticking of the Ikea clock, and she pulls her running clothes out of the wardrobe, digs out her worn-out Nikes, and in just a few minutes she’s running past the few people strolling along the path beside the river.

From the corner of her eye she can see the tall, newly built apartment blocks, which rumour has it are seventy-five per cent occupied by doctors. She runs past the new bowling alley, trying not to look at the other side of the river where the fire station, Janne’s workplace, sits red and blunt, like a reminder of the unending meagreness of life.

How fast can I run?

How far?

Smart 1950s villas line the slope down to the river. She’s been inside several of them in connection with other cases.

Her heart beating like a hammer inside her now.

Her field of vision reduced to a narrow oblong.

Move, get out of the way. And she feels her body working, obeying her, and the adrenalin pumps and she swings up over Braskens Bridge and runs on past Saab.

This was where Mum worked, she thinks. This was where she met the man who gave her her second child, my brother. This was where our lives, Mum’s and Dad’s and mine, turned into one big lie. Unless that had already happened before then?

I refuse, Malin thinks. It’s not going to happen to me.

She’s stopped outside the factory gates. Stands there panting, leaning over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath, then she runs back towards the city centre again, thinking: I refuse, refuse, refuse, and the word becomes a mantra inside her, carrying her forward, and she thinks, I’m thirty-six years old, I can’t allow myself to be defined by the mistakes made by another woman and her husband, and by their inability to confront themselves. I’ve got the opportunity now to do precisely that, to look myself in the mirror and finally do something with my life.

I have to visit my little brother. For my own sake, for Tove’s, for his. Have to conquer my fear. Because I am afraid of what might be waiting for me, aren’t I?

Tove. She wants to go straight away.

Malin fights to suppress the dark feeling that grows in her stomach whenever she thinks of Tove, and she’s aware that she’s making the same mistake that she’s always made.

But still.

Still.

First I have to finish this job. Put pressure on Ottilia Stenlund. Make her talk.

And Malin thinks of Peter Hamse. She hasn’t spoken to him today. Even if I have a perfectly valid reason to.

Daniel and Janne. Bastards. And she forces herself onward, her surroundings become colours, sounds, pain, breathing, until finally she slumps in front of the door to her block as the bells of St Lars Church strike half past six. She feels her stomach clench and quickly leans to one side, spewing up all the bile from her stomach, and it feels incredibly good and her whole being is nothing but sweat and a chilly dampness.

She sticks her fingers down her throat.

Throws up the last contents of her stomach.

Sees her dad’s face in front of her.

Dad, she thinks. How am I ever going to forgive you?

39

Saturday, 15 May

The car is pressing its way along the E4, heading north across the flat landscape of Östergötland.

It’s only half past six in the morning, and Malin is glad that Zeke’s driving, no coffee in the world could fight off the tiredness she feels, even though she got a full night’s sleep.

She had to nag Sven Sjöman into letting them drive to Stockholm and put an extra strain on their already hard-pressed budget, to talk to Ottilia Stenlund in person rather than let their colleagues in Stockholm take care of it.

But she’s sure that only she could do it properly, she and Zeke, and she really does want to follow up this line of inquiry, and Sven hadn’t been able to resist the strength of her conviction.

Tired, so tired.

She hasn’t caught up yet, the nights and days when everything seemed to be happening at once are still in her system, and she could do with sleeping for a week. But not now, there’s no time at the moment, and she listens to the sound of the engine as she watches some white cows grazing in a meadow full of yellow flowers in front of a red-painted farmhouse on the edge of a dense forest of fir trees.

What’s hidden among those trees? she thinks.

In those dark, in-between spaces?

What are we heading into, Zeke and I? Are we going to find anything new, or is the trail that leads to social worker Ottilia Stenlund a dead end? Are the lines of inquiry that Waldemar Ekenberg, Johan Jakobsson, Börje Svärd, and the others are following the right way forward?

Maybe the truth is to be found, if not in the Economic Liberation Front, then in some other militant organisation, Islamic extremists, biker gangs?

The pistol in the holster under her jacket presses against her body.

On the phone last night, when Malin insisted that they try to get Ottilia Stenlund to talk about the adoption themselves, Sven told them to get to Stockholm as early as they could. He had told her that they still had no idea who the man with the bomb on the bike was, and that the interviews up at the University Hospital hadn’t come up with anything. Nor had the forensic examination, so the field was wide open for Malin and Zeke.

‘Do what you can,’ Sven had said. ‘Just keep going. We can deal with the financial consequences of the trip later.’

And Malin had felt that what he was really saying was: ‘Keep going, into the darkness.’

And she looks out at the grey tarmac of the E4, reads a sign saying ‘Norrköping 14’ and thinks: I really am pushing into an unknown darkness now, I can feel it, but it doesn’t frighten me, what I’m scared of is somewhere else. And Zeke reaches for the CD player and switches on the minor-key German choral music he’s so fond of, but which has the ability to give Malin a serious headache when played at the wrong moment.

It’s just right for this moment, though.

And she leans her head against the side window, shuts her eyes, and falls asleep.

When she wakes up again the car is rolling through the southern suburbs of Stockholm.

The brutal high-rises of Botkyrka seem to be bogged down against a receding horizon.

The hidden splendour of Mälarhöjden, the relative comfort of Midsommarkransen, where the functionalist blocks seem to defy the roar of the motorway and want to give their inhabitants a good hug.

Stockholm.

I moved here once, Malin thinks. With Tove, who was so young at the time, and it was almost impossible to reconcile life as a mother of a young child with studying at Police Academy. It worked, but only just.

Stockholm was like a piece of scenery for me, Malin thinks as they roll across the Skanstull Bridge and through the tunnel under the shimmering, ostentatious façade of the recently built hotel. I never found my way into the city, I never gained access, and why should I have? A single mother studying to join the police. Could there be anyone of lower status in a city completely obsessed with money and fashion, with everything just a bit beyond the ordinary?

I told myself that I wanted to stay, Malin thinks. But I convinced myself that it was impossible in practical terms, that I wanted to move back to Janne and maybe try again, but it was really something different. A strong sense of inadequacy, of not being good enough, and that’s how you felt all your life, isn’t it, Mum? The feeling that the world is so big, and you so little, and that others are important, while you’re of no value.

When they emerge into the light again she can see the back of the parliament building, Riksdagshuset, and the water of Riddarfjärden, and she thinks: How could I ever have imagined that I could fit in here? How many people have succeeded with the journey I failed to make? Moving from a provincial city and making the capital their own? Succeeding, making something of themselves, astonishing the world, if only a very small part of it?

The München Brewery building rises from the water like a medieval citadel on Söder Mälarstrand behind them, the cliffs seem to be there to protect the bourgeois inhabitants from attack, and the tower of the City Hall on the opposite shore seems to warn: Feel free to come, but don’t think you’re anything special. The handsome functionalist blocks along Norr Mälarstrand are bigger than Malin remembers, and she wonders what it’s like living there, waking up every morning to see the water and the
Western Bridge. She remembers the flat she and Tove sublet out in Traneberg, a single room with an alcove for a bed, on the ground floor above all the bins, with a view of a car park.

But Tove was happy there.

With her pre-school.

With her babysitters.

Maybe because back then they both had a sense that they were actually going somewhere, and maybe that’s why Tove has the nerve to take the next step now? Is that why the thought of her leaving makes me angry and panicky?

Janne. Daniel Högfeldt. They’re on their way towards something new as well. But what about me, where am I going? And then she sees the boy in an anonymous hospital room. The way he’s tried to suppress his mother’s face, erasing it, and even though she knows that the boy is a man now, he’ll always be a boy to her.

Sveavägen.

They emerge from the City Tunnel and get caught in the chaotic traffic beneath the blue façade of the Concert Hall. Malin watches young girls cross the road by the Adidas shop on the corner of Kungsgatan, and their footsteps are firm, determined. I never had that sort of step when I was your age, when I lived here.

They turn off into Rådmansgatan and drive up to the spring greenery of Tegnérlunden, and the romantic statue of Strindberg which seems to liken the old nutter to a lion, and then they turn into a side street whose name Malin doesn’t know.

‘Teknologgatan. It should be here somewhere,’ Zeke says, pulling up.

‘Norrmalm Social Services, office number four. Let’s hope Ottilia Stenlund will see us, if she’s actually working Saturday this week. Otherwise we’ll have to head over to her home address.’

Hardship doesn’t take weekends off during the spring of 2010.

The office is open, just as Ottilia Stenlund had said it would be.

And she’s there.

Malin and Zeke are asked to wait in a windowless room, its walls painted an aggressive shade of yellow that makes Malin think of Hare Krishna.

Ottilia Stenlund is willing to see them, but she has two meetings with clients to get through first.